alt Hacker NewsShow HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN
Saw Karpathy's HackerTube and wanted the same thing for books. So I had Claude build one (Opus 5.5).
It's ~16.5k books that at least two different HN commenters brought up, from 2007 till now. Each book links back to the comments that mentioned it. Data is downloadable from the about page.
To be clear: Claude wrote almost all of it, including the data pipeline and the site. I mostly steered and made calls, bought the domain name, etc.
It counts mentions, so it's not perfect (praising a book and trashing it both count). If your favourite book is missing or matched to the wrong thing, tell me.
Comments
I noticed almost all of the top recommended books are written by men. A quick skim of the first 100 books on the home page and I see ~4 by women. The Fiction category was largely the same. Nothing against these books, I have read many and enjoyed them, but that's a pretty crazy ratio.
I will add some personal recommendations to maybe get picked up by the algorithm:
Science fiction:
- Parable of the Sower and Kindred, both by Octavia Butler
- The Lathe of Heaven and The Word for World Is Forest, both by Ursula K Le Guin (also The Left Hand of Darkness, which I did see on there)
Non-science fiction:
- Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (essays)
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
I haven’t looked into the site code so don’t know if it’s some tracker or pure coincidence, but I own 15 of the first 20 books that showed up!
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on HackerHack, like HackerBooks and HackerBooks, but with comments and other posts and news and stuff. Some say it’s just HackerNews, but those are just Luddites who don’t get it.
Some of the covers seem to be cropped? Also kinda astonished how bad a lot of cover designs are?
Thank you so much. It's incredibly useful for many people
It seems the published dates need tidied up. Brave new world is showing as published in the 2000s.
Very cool though and love seeing all of the covers in various forms of condition.
I like the responsiveness of the website.
But there's no way Vanity Fair by Thackeray so high on "top all-time" list. It turns out that a lot of comments are about Vanity Fair magazine.
I assume that like Karpathy you used Claude Code Desktop. The harness seems to be more capable than VS Code or terminal. Could you have done it with TUI alone?
Nice, I like it!
Feedback: I don’t understand how the rising category works. I looked up a couple of books and they seemed to have peaked a while ago.
This is the best HN day EVER since I stumbled on the site 10 years ago: first HackerTube and now this! Thank you SO much, both of you!
this has already existed for a long time, but I think it would be cool if it was really recommendations, instead of just mentions
The Science Fiction section is pretty much spot on, and in roughly the order I’d do it myself :)
Seeing a book or two I recommended more than 10 years ago is pretty cool.
Thats pure gold. Thank you my friend!
This is really useful! Thanks for sharing!
Have AI create a clean room rewrite of each book, so we can read them on the site.
Are you tracking # of clicks you are getting?
Do you guys really trust the taste of users on here? I don't
I love this and feel it would be greatly enhanced with semantic search.
Gold gold . Thanks .now i need one for yt and one for only science papers
You know, one thing that I think is interesting in tech circles is how much interest we have in maths in general, except that there is almost nothing on the "top" list that I saw that was related to probability and statistics. It's like P&S, which is probably the most useful math for most people who need to make decisions in life, is just not that interesting to people with a technical bend.
I wonder if it is because simulation can often allow you to get around needing P&S techniques in general? Or maybe it is that (Neural Network) ML models allow you to often approximate the things you might do with P&S in terms of making decisions?
No real point, I just think it is interesting.
Compared to HackerTube, this is pure gold! Design books, it is!
I love seeing The Power Broker is in this list. His books is incredible. I wish more people would slog through it. I've personally bought it for at least 5 people and no one can seem to finish it.
Awesome
I expected way more books for software engineering.
Liked HackerBooks! My college algorithm professor always recommends the Concrete mathematics book.
apparently angry birds is a book? and it's more popular than the new testament in the "other" category.
Not enough time to read these!
There's been a few of these already, and it feels a bit off, I'd suggest you do one more prompt and weight by karma
The cover page for The Three Body Problem is from some other author than the one recommended.
Made a version for Reddit:
I used https://hackernewsbooks.com/ for years, it was fantastic for personal buys and gifts. But then it disappeared a few months a go.
Glad someone has created a new one.
If I self promote my book, ENOF by Sol Yin, about a possible AI future in one comment and hope really hard that someone else legitimately says something about it by name in another comment, I'll make the list?
Good for me. Thank you!!!
having 16.5k recommendations is the same as having 0 recommendations
Hi - I work at eBooks.com. If you'd like to register as an affiliate with us, send me a msg (email in profile). We have a good commission.
Next is HackerXXX
very nice!
edit: no love for the secret life of circuits under electronics, tho it is a fairly recent book
Interesting discussion, thanks for posting.
Hacker Music tomorrow?
Great site, thank you for sharing.
Now, all we need is diff-book-order(1), a command which takes as input your personal "library.bib" file and it orders all books mentioned on the parent's site that are not already part of the personal library.
I don't know if this is in there, but I wonder if books have a kind of 'eb and flood', where books raise to the top, stay there a while, then go away again. Could you plot some graphs? I'd expect some alrounders to stay around in the background forever, and other books come and go according to the average HN trending mood
Thank you!
I think now we need 'HN-News - HackerBooks, but for news mentioned on HN'
SCNR
Even though I like HackerTube as well as HackerBooks. However, for HackerBooks, I am missing the summary of why people on HN recommend it.
Your book cover images are trash and I don’t blame you. There isn’t a good compendium of high-quality cover images and metadata for books that you can use for commercial purposes. Google books is amazing but they won’t let you use it for commercial purposes so there is a huge hole in the market if someone is willing to solve it. Calibre does a pretty good job, but it has its own algorithm that is very convoluted and involves searching Google images and multiple other sources and compiling them.
This is awesome.
Sometimes, I crave the directory like appearances of lycos/altavista/yahoo...
With finite reference points, directories work well. I would love to see this as a text version too.